Discourage questions being marked as answered within an hour or so of being posted

Question

I keep on seeing a fair number of questions (such as this one) which get marked as answered within 5-10 minutes of being posted. Sometimes the questions like this are insanely popular and actually see some proper discussion, however often I see questions have few views and only 1 answer. The trouble with these questions is that very few people have scrutinised the answer for correctness, or possibly a better solution.

I always make a point of not accepting my answers until a day or so has passed — would it not be a good idea to put a short (1 hour or so) time limit on accepting answers on new questions with few views or votes, or perhaps just an additional confirmation dialog, something along the lines of:

Your question is new and not many people have had a chance to look at it yet. Are you sure you don't want to wait to see if anyone else has a better suggestion?

Answer 1

I think I can support a limit, but much less than an hour.

Anyone who accepts an answer within, say, 15 minutes of posting their question is almost by definition being lazy in a bad way. That is, they're accepting the first answer that comes along without considering all their options.

Greg Hewgill's graph^† shows that very quick answers are accepted less often than the first probably more complete answers, but gives no clue about how soon the winning answer was accepted:

edit: this is implemented. I think 15 minutes (the current setting) is completely reasonable; if you're accepting earlier than that, it's irresponsible IMO as others haven't even had a chance to even LOOK at it.

^† select extract(epoch from a.creationdate-q.creationdate) from post q join post a on (a.id = q.acceptedanswerid)

Answer 2

I definitely agree. There have been several situations where I arrive on a question and have something new to add to the discussion or solution, but simply hit the back button because an answer has already been accepted. Maybe that's wrong of me, but I only have a limited number of hours in the day, and I'd rather spend them productively.

Perhaps this is another feature that could only be turned on for very new users (measured either by time or reputation) -- either disable the accepted answer button entirely, or leave it up with some extra nag text like "Please consider waiting a little longer before accepting an answer, so as to encourage more answers to be posted!"

This suggestion would be suitable to go along with the text suggested here: When a question is posted, can we advise the poster to hang around and respond to comments?

Answer 3

I don't agree with that idea.

If I found the exact answer within 5 minutes, why wouldn't I be able to accept it ? Often see questions like "this is not working, help" with an answer like "do this, it'll fix it".

Also new users that come by not often will never come back 1 hour later to accept the answer...

Answer 4

I disagree:

1. There's no reason a question can't be answered faster than that.
2. There's no reason a question will be answered correctly in that time.
3. One-shot users will simply not accept the answer and never return to the site.

However, a warning message might be appropriate for when ink is still drying on the question.

This question is only [n] minutes old, and other users may wish to add more answers. Are you sure you want to accept an answer now?

Answer 5

I don't agree... if I ask a question and found my answer, I accept it.

Perhaps you are thinking about subjective answers, but if you have a specific problem and found your solution, why should you wait?

Also, this question is related

Answer 6

I'm not sure that it supports the proposal, but Greg Hewgill's SO stats graphs (scroll to the last graph) show that the majority of questions have accepted answers within an hour of posting.

See also: Meta Stack Overflow statistics graphs.

Edit: Greg's graph doesn't show the time to OP acceptance of the answer - instead it shows the time between question and answer posting - the acceptance might well have come some time later.

Answer 7

Since we have community involvement in voting, the best answer can be voted up by the community.

Granted, this doesn't help questions that are asked and answered very quickly -- but if the answer fixed the problem for the asker, why mess with it?

If you have a better answer, posting it will cause the post to be 'bumped'. Doing this at a high use time of day will almost guarantee upvotes if your answer is better.

Answer 8

I keep on seeing questions marked as answered within 5-10 minutes of being posted - The trouble with these questions is that very few people have scrutinized the answer for correctness, or possibly a better solution.

[We should] put a short time limit on accepting answers on new questions with few views or votes, or perhaps just an additional confirmation dialog.

We have notifications, so if a new answer is posted, the OP is alerted and they can change their mind, especially if the new answer points out flaws in the accepted answer.

Further, the OP knows best whether the answer worked for them or not. Yes, a better answer may come along later, but that doesn't negate the fact that not only was the accepted answer "good enough" but the person that submitted it delivered it more quickly so the OP could get on with their work.

The effect of preventing or even discouraging people from accepting an answer immediately is going to be overall negative. We've already had to put measures in place to encourage people to accept answers more, and many, many, many comments posted are devoted to asking the OP to accept an answer.

Keep in mind that the community's highest voted answer appears immediately below the accepted answer, and anyone who comes to this question in the future will start at the top, and if the first answer doesn't work, they'll try the second, and so forth until they've resolved their problem.

The system has many measures already to account for poorly chosen accepted answers, and is designed to work despite them.

Lastly, if such a measure is implemented, it might encourage some users to take longer to post their answers. Yes, they may be more finely crafted than a quick and dirty (but correct!) answer, but the OP is left waiting for their answers because some people choose to use this grace period to inflate their chances at getting accepted, rather than posting a good, quick answer.

I do NOT want to, in any way, discourage the quick and dirty answer.

Such a change would have a stronger negative impact on the system than positive.

Answer 9

I think a minimum of one day should be required for acceptance. A question with an accepted answer discourages other answers -- including better ones. I have answered questions that already had an accepted answer, but it's been a frustrating experience -- spending time on something that is barely noticed, if at all. People move on after an accepted answer.

So why does a question need another answer if one was already good enough for the asker? It depends on what you see as the value of a question. Is it to show that a problem was "solved" in record time, or is it to record a thoughtful answer with long term value to searchers? A carefully thought out answer gives context and raises issues that may not be addressed in the accepted answer.

I've also seen accepted answers that are wrong or misleading or incomplete, and the asker doesn't know any better. One down vote or comment on an accepted answer with 12 votes doesn't get much notice.

People are concerned that this will mean some questions will end up without accepted answers. That doesn't bother me. Doesn't the answer with the most votes count for something?

(I'm glad to see there is no accepted answer to this question yet -- at least no "offical" answer.)

Answer 10

Answering an already answered question needs to be encouraged by a chance of earning additional reputation, then no delay is necessary. For example, you answer a question, which was already answered, and the OP changes their accepted answer to yours, you get an additional +15 to reputation. Can be a 15 minute timeout, in which the additional reputation bonus is not awarded (=OP changed their mind).

So you get +30 reputation for this accepted answer + any upvotes you would normally get. The number of additional reputation can be adjusted, depending on question age, i.e. +15 (fixed modifier) +1 for every day after a question was posted, to a maximum of +30 (variable modifier), so in total you may get up to 60 reputation for one accepted answer. Is it not a good stimulus for trying to beat an accepted answer with a better one?

All numbers here are subject to discussion and analysis.

Answer 11

I actually think this is a good idea as it could also help cut down on situations where someone provides an answer that may work and gets to be accepted, but someone else later on comes along and provides the best solution for the problem and ultimately gets the accepted answer status. I believe you lost the points if your accepted answer is unaccepted so having a waiting period before an answer could be accepted might cut down on hard feelings because of changing accepted answers.

However, I might go as far as to argue that there should be about 24 hours between when a question is opened and when an answer can be accepted just to give a good opportunity for people to view the question and possibly answer it.

Answer 12

Maybe the right thing to do is to make the time to when an answer become accepted depend on community votes? My rough idea is that if a lot of people are saying that answers are good, then a genuinely good one can be nominated rapidly. On the other hand, if hardly anybody takes any interest in a question then the threshold drops over time.